Twenty years since the first graced our TV screens, winning the hearts of the nation, the Saturday Kitchen chef is winging his way to Southport.

His show will be a fast-paced, interactive and hi-tech extravaganza. Packed with James’s signature cooking demonstrations, full of surprises and not to mention some very special guests, audiences across the country will be thrilled as this multi media production is brought live to the big stage.

“I've been cooking live on TV for 20 years now and I felt it was time to do something I’ve never done before that was truly special.

“I’m so excited to be heading to Southport, doing what I do best but on the big stage. I can’t wait to get out there and visit so many great parts of the UK, this show is going to be super cool.

“I’m pulling out my favourite recipes and mixing in plenty of surprises and special guests in what I hope is going to be feast of a live show.”

Food is still one of the mainstays of British television, which is why James’s show should be a huge draw.

James gave us an insight into his preparation for this year’s event and what we can expect from him in the future, and says he is pulling out all the stops.

Growing up on a pig and cattle farm near Malton, James was expected to pull his weight while still at primary school, and says he doesn't remember a time when he didn't want to work with food.

Saturday Kitchen presenter and chef James Martin

“I helped with the animals, so I understood meat.

“My grandad and uncle kept allotments, so I learned the importance of vegetables and seasonality.

“And I also learned if you can walk you can work!”

For one so young he’d already gone way beyond the kind of skills learned by rookies. When he was at school, he says, his sister was the academic one, and he, a boy with dyslexia, “aspired to a G+ grade”. But that didn’t matter with food.

James left home at 18 with £20 in his pocket to take the skills he’d learned on Scarborough College’s catering course to one of London’s top kitchens – under Anthony Worrall Thompson at 190 Queensgate.

Now best known for fronting BBC1’s Saturday Kitchen for the past six years, he and celebrity chef guests cook up tasty food against the clock.

He says he has “the best job in the world”, working with his heroes, even adding: “Don’t tell the Beeb, but I’d do it for nothing.”

With his self-deprecating Yorkshire humour, James was one of the bookies’ choices to replace Jeremy Clarkson as Top Gear presenter, earlier this year.

A Ferrari fan he may be, but cooking is clearly his first love. “It wasn’t for me. I’ll stick to cooking, thanks.

“Cars are a hobby. Cooking is my job; the career I chose when I was eight years old. I never anticipated I would be doing it on TV but it’s good fun.

“It’s still always about the food. You have to keep your hand in. Or you just become a TV chef and I don’t really want to be that.

“But it’s whatever you want to do. It’s a personal choice and I believe you have got to have one foot in the kitchen.

“It started in a kitchen and, at some point after the television has stopped, it will end in a kitchen.”